Here’s a report from Sarah Keller writing for The Goat. Click through and read the whole article and to check out the graphics. Here’s an excerpt:
Now, managers are trying to balance the need for beach-restoring floods, which increase non-native trout numbers upstream, with the need to maintain chub habitat in the Grand Canyon. That left some researchers asking the question: If big, artificial floods didn’t help humpback chub as expected, what are the root causes of their low numbers, and what will help them thrive?
Despite being limited by food availability, the warm water-loving chub has gradually been making a comeback. They’ve likely benefited from recent increases in water temperatures as drought has lowered Lake Powell, and from trout control measures. Managers have removed rainbows from the Grand Canyon main channel in the past. The Fish and Wildlife Service may do that again, if trout numbers increase, and they march downstream. The National Park Service is already controlling rainbow trout, along with brown trout, in the side streams Shinamu Creek and Bright Angel Creek.
But a majority of the Grand Canyon’s roughly 10,000 chub live in or around the Little Colorado River, and biologists worry that if that single population becomes diseased, or something toxic spills into the river, it could doom the entire species. So National Park Service biologists have also been reintroducing chub to additional side streams, and this May, they discovered chub from an introduced population spawning for the first time in Havasu Creek, in the Grand Canyon — an encouraging sign.
More on the Colorado River from Allen Best writing for The Mountain Town News. Here’s an excerpt:
Fully half of the Colorado River’s water comesfrom Colorado, with lesser amounts from other states before the river is stopped at Glen Canyon Dam to create the reservoir most people call Lake Powell.
Now comes the news that because of the drought that has continued more years than not since 1999, less water will be released from Powell downstream to Las Vegas, Arizona and California. Also as a result, less electricity can be produced at Hoover Dam.
This was not surprising news. Water experts for some years have spoke with increasing alarm about the razor-thin margin between supplies and demands in the Colorado River Basin.
As is, water hasn’t reached the Pacific Ocean with regularity since the 1960s – and not at all since the late 1990s.
Bull’s eye for this story is Las Vegas. A century ago, it wasn’t much more than a railroad depot in a place that annually gets only 4 inches of precipitation. Mafia dons and gambling and giant hotels all came later. When the Colorado River Compact was drawn up in 1922, only 700,000 acre-feet out of what the compact framers optimistically estimated were an annual 16 million acre-feet of flows were allocated to Nevada. California could see its future needs, and Colorado presciently saw the need for a compact before California slurped up all the water. But nobody foresaw The Strip.
More Colorado River Basin coverage from Gary Harmon writing for The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel:
Arizona, California and Nevada can’t demand more water from Colorado for nearly a decade, but a day of reckoning is growing nearer, water officials said. The possibility of a call on the river, however, is underscored by the aridity of 2013. “It looks like 2013 will be the third-driest year for Lake Powell,” Eric Kuhn, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, said Tuesday in a meeting with The Daily Sentinel editorial board. “Low reservoir levels have everyone’s attention.”
Runoff for the water year, which ends Sept. 30, was 35 percent to 50 percent of normal through July, setting the stage for dire predictions of runoff in the coming years.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority this month called for federal disaster relief to address the water scarcity in the Colorado River system and the Bureau of Reclamation announced this week that it was looking to store more water in Lake Powell in 2014 than it might otherwise.
The upper-basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming are required under a 1922 agreement to deliver 7.5 million acre feet of water to the lower basin each year, as well as water for Mexico. That hasn’t been a problem because the requirement is based on a 10-year rolling average.
The current average includes the high-water year of 2012, Kuhn noted, but that year eventually will be factored out and its influence could be leveled out by a succession of low-runoff years. “As a practical matter, we’re not going to run into a compact problem until 2021, 2022, 2023,” Kuhn said.
The compact states also have a “peace agreement” that expires in 2025 and the parties appear committed to observing it, Kuhn said.
Still, the low levels of water in the Colorado River reservoirs are pumping new importance into talks about how to manage the river, Kuhn said.
Another agreement among the River District, Western Slope water users and Denver Water has yet to be signed by all parties, but already is paying off for the Western Slope, Kuhn said. The Colorado River Cooperative Agreement provides for the river levels to be maintained at the levels that would be required if the Shoshone generating station in Glenwood Canyon were operating even at times that the plant is down or operating at less than capacity. The agreement is being honored, Kuhn said, as are provisions governing the operations of Green Mountain Reservoir.
“Everyone is sticking to the agreement,” said Mesa County Commissioner Steve Acquafresca, who represents the county on the River District board.
More coverage from Anne MacKinnon writing for WyoFile.com. Here’s an excerpt:
Congress, sadly “dysfunctional” in this era, has to recognize that the nation must put money into scientific research and plans that help people, infrastructure, and natural resources to adapt and change to meet the uncertainties of climate change, said Pat Mulroy, outspoken general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
She said people involved in the Colorado River have managed in the past dozen years to negotiate deals and create relationships that can be built upon now. Negotiators will be able, she said, to come up with ways in which there will be no water battles, and no “winners and losers” on the river, despite dwindling supplies.
Everyone will stand to lose a little, but no one, perhaps not even the river itself, need face the disaster of no water for vital needs. Congress, however, will have to act, backing whatever joint proposals develop to prevent such a disaster.